


Love is the new sexy (En)

by NeverTheFall



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Cute Rosamund Mary "Rosie" Watson, Developing Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Jealous John, Lesbian Irene Adler, M/M, Matchmaking, Post-Season/Series 04, keepjohnlockalivecompetition, sherlocksmolmescompetition, writeforjohnlockcompetition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 22:33:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20749844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverTheFall/pseuds/NeverTheFall
Summary: [Johnlock]Sherlock asks Irene Adler to help him with a difficult case... understand John's heart.The journey in the small apartment of the 221B Baker street is full of pressure...|Sherlock (TV) is a series written and realized by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, from the novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle|





	Love is the new sexy (En)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Love is the new sexy (FR)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20732540) by [NeverTheFall](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeverTheFall/pseuds/NeverTheFall). 

> A fanfic that I really wanted to write for a long time, and that I finally move in post season 4. hope you like it!
> 
> Thank you so much to my friend Eri for translating my works in English (so this version!)

* * *

Irene Adler was an attractive woman. Despite the years she took to flee the Pakistan terrorist group, despite the cold, the hunger, the impression to be as fragile as never, she never lost her beauty, nor her ambition. Little by little, months after months, she knew how to get herself together and took back her influence upon this world, shadowy world where all of those conspiracies will someday strike on the surface. 

Sometimes, this life was too much for her. The Woman often reminisced with melancholy her last game, the curly brown hair of a man, his captivating look, his shining eyes with that particular intelligent. She sometimes sent messages, as if she was trying to get back a link, wanting to see again by her own eyes that attractive mind with no limit. She didn't like him, that wasn't for that reason she wanted to see him again. She just felt a certain likeness between them, something connected them et made her come back to him.

She sometimes sent messages; right, but he never answered. This was fine to her.

However, one day, she got a text from him.

This was a beautiful autumn morning, just when the sun started shining and Irene was about to sleep in her mistress' arms, her client for the night. While sheets were wet and sweat sticked her skin, she would not get up, extract herself from that moist bed to meet the icy water from the shower next to them. While she was letting sleepiness get to her, giving up the idea before she even though about doing it, she heard her phone vibrate on the wooden bedside table on her right. The young lady growled as she extended her hand, hearing her companion's low voice asking who's on the phone. She ignored her as she saw the author's message.

**Good morning. SH**

A smile drew on her face and, as a new energy grew inside, she got out of the room to get to the balcony.

** _Hello. Slept well?_ **

**Could be worse. And you? I hope I haven't wake up your client . SH**

** _Don't worry about her. I didn't thought you would one day res-_ **

She bit her lower lip, deleting the start of the message she wrote. It seemed too quick, too insisting, too curious. The beauty in brown wanted to be seen has detached, seductress, and wanted to fall again into that game. She wanted to start a new game.

While she was thinking on how to turn her sentence to get her ways, another vibration shook her skin, and she quickly read the new message.

**Dinner?**

Irene froze at this word, her eyebrows raised by surprise. She read again, not believing what she saw, but the word stayed the same. It wasn't normal, at least, it didn't seem like the man she met. It didn't seem like the famous Holmes to accept a proposal she made so long ago that refused because his heart and mind was elsewhere.

** _Problem with doctor Watson?_ **

**I believe your advices about social relationship would help me in… a complex case. SH**

**Please. SH**

Hesitating between laugh or feel pity for him, the Dominatrix shut down her phone with a mouvement, and with a sigh she packed her things together. After all she owe him. She helped John Watson understand his feelings, now it was time for Sherlock to understand that there were things that wasn't understandable with logic or rationality. It was a more interesting game she thought.

——☺——

_ Haaa _

John closed his eyelids a few seconds, trying to remain calm, while he gently put his hands on Rosamund’s ears.

“Sherlock… Your...phone. Irene Adler.”

“Ho.” the consulting detective took his phone with agility, and consulted it without paying any attention to his friend. “Thanks John.”

“And could you...how do I put it. Change your ringtone.”

As he closed the flip of his phone, the brown man crossed his eyes with the doctor, and with a big surprise, mixed up with a bit of boredom, answered nonchalantly.

“It didn’t bother you since and it’s been two years, why would I change it now?”

“Rosie Sherlock, Rosie !”

“What Rosie?”

“A child does not have to hear those...sounds living environment ! It’s indecent !”

Sherlock was about to argue, but the dark look in John’s eyes prevented him from any commentary. He was no longer scared of those deadly eyes nor this barely veiled threat that he saw way too often in the day to fear them again, but he knew that John was particularly stubborn when he was angry at him for something. Plus - and that, Sherlock will never confess this aloud - he may be right for once.

For the good cause, he still had the forelock to raise his eyes before making a funny face for Rosie who laughed and reach out for him. Watson watched the scene with a small smile, the heart a bit tight. He was happy his roommate got quickly himself together after the Final Problem and got along well with her daughter. But sometimes, while that so characteristic noise of a message entering made itself heard, it made him remember with nostalgia that Irene had still managed to leave a mark on the mind of his best friend. And despite the time that went, still having that feeling of jealousy sleeping inside him was unpleasant. If the situation before could let assume he had a chance with the man who shares his life platonically, it changed long ago. Yet strangely, and with a regret for that bit of selfishness, he would like Sherlock to not continue this relationship with the Woman, because the simple idea to see the detective making out with the attractive young woman...he knew way too well the pain that that caused him.

“What is she saying?” he asked without thinking, and when the brown man scanned him he dodged this azure eyes. “Twenty-one messages Sherlock. I was just wondering what were you talking about.”

“She wanted to come see us. I think she’ll be there in the afternoon, to stay a few days here. Anyway, I need her for a case.”

“Need her? What for?” couldn’t help but to replicate John with incomprehension. “We are pursuing a butcher who kills old people in the street. I don’t see how Adler could help us track him down, unless she tries to charm him and even you know this is a bad idea.”

“Another case John.”

“We don’t have another one.”

“You just don’t know it.”

“Ha, so now you resolve cases without me !?” exclaimed the former military, and he winced when he heard the bit of deception he tried to hide in his voice.

Sherlock only answered by an another sigh, and the feeling of treason sneakily infiltrating his veins felt even stronger. He had the feeling of being  _ replaced _ , and it was stupid, but the fact his roommate chose someone else’s help, Irene on top of that, and the fact that he discards him for those adventures that John desperately needed right now was unbearable.

The curly one who guessed his thoughts has always, Watson knew that by his icy eyes inspecting him with meticulousness, because he felt the hand oh the brown man on his shoulder - the unharmed one - with sympathy before heading to the kitchen to make two cups of tea. John wasn’t satisfied by that answer, but he knew he wouldn’t get anything else for now.

Pained, he took Rosie in his arms, and observed his friend with a vague air. It’s been too long since they lived together (not enough in a way), but he was still attracted by the grace that Sherlock used in his daily mouvements, his long fingers that accurately dosed the perfect dose, according to his words, of water in the cups, or his dark strands who negligently fell on his forehead. Living with him was a perpetual surprise, exciting stories and a comfortable everyday domestic feeling. He didn’t know, in all honesty, what his life would look like without the brown man to bring him back up. That mutual help, that complicity that had moved Sherlock away from drugs, and had moved John away from that constant discomfort with the everyday.

“Here.” his friend said before handing him a burning cup that the military accepted with a head mouvement; “I forgot to ask you but do you mind? I mean, that the Woman stays here.” 

“Were you really going to take my opinion into account anyway? And don’t answer, it was a rhetorical question.” he added when he saw Sherlock open his mouth. “I don’t really mind, I just don’t know where she could sleep.”   
“In my bedroom, obviously.”

John almost choked, and swallowed with a bit of difficulties. After a few seconds of struggle to assimilate the sentence the consulting detective just said, he dared ask the burning question in his mind :

“What about you?”   
“In  _ your _ bedroom, obviously John. Could you stop making small talk again?”   
“My bedr… Sherlock, there’s already Rosie next to my bed and half of your things, and do you really believe I would let you in?!”

“And? I move away what’s mine, you get back 46% of your room space. If I sleep here, you take back only 9%, and that’s more than nothing !”

“That is not the problem Sherlock!” John sighed as he brought his hand to his neck with embarrassment. Right, they were sharing a lot of things, but even the blond man had a limit. Mostly when this limit was about a too eccentric roommate and that he love way too much. “I will not split my mattress for you, that’s all ! More, you move, and moreover you wake up in the middle of the night. You will wake Rosamund up and it’ll need an hour to calm her down after that.”

“I promise you to do none of that, and anyway it’s not like you had a choice : it’s either me or Adler - and we both know you’ll choose me in the end.”

The doctor remained forbidden in front of that unusual confidence of the brown man, but he couldn’t help but have an amused smile drawn on his face. He pretended to think for a minute, turning the cup of tea between his hands while Rosie tried to take it, and started to say slowly :

“You know, it has been a while since I went on a date with a woman, and Irene Adler is beautiful, and a lot of men’s dream. Between her and a detective who’d rather go in the morgue to slap corpses with a whip than to stay with his best friend, I do believe that my decision in pretty easy to take…”

Sherlock, with a bit of a choked face, was ready to reply but John never knew what were his arguments since Mrs Hudson got in the room trotting. When he saw his landlady, the curly one step back from John as per usual, and asked her what she was doing here, with a spark in his eyes that made resonate the world  _ crime _ in his best friend’s mind.

“Homicide? Suicide? Drowning? Murder? Oh no, even better, serial killer?” he reeled with enthusiasm while John put Rosie back on the ground in order to stand up.

“Oh, Sherlock !” Mme Hudson lectured him with a somewhat maternal expression. “I am not seeing you so you can run again everywhere in the streets looking for another madman. There is a charming lady on the landing that ask if she can come in. She already came here you know… a few years ago though.”

“Oh.” Sherlock stood up a little bit too quick for the former military’s taste who folded his eyes while observing him.  _ analyze John, analyze… _ “You can tell her to come upstairs.”

“Okay, but I’m not your housekeeper !” the old woman responded, knowing very well that the two men were already not listening anymore.

While they heard the hurry footsteps of their landlady going down the stairs, the doctor contemplated his friend silently. He tried to read him like he does, decrypt the emotions whom he felt at the moment. Love? Interest? Oh, he was sure for the second option, but sadly not for the first one. What he thought was an intellectual connexion between those two became suddenly something that he didn’t know since he knew saved Irene from a certain death, and he was still speaking to her. Answered her, even. That little pain in his chest squeezed his heart a little.

Taken with an unconscious impulse, he started moving towards the door as an idea sprout in his mind, and he looked at the brown one.  _ It’s better if he was alone with Irene...right? There are surely things to say without my presence to bother them… _

“Sherlock, I am going to take a walk with Rosie outside. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“Now?” his friend asked, and John saw something that looked like relief in his eyes. “Very well. But don’t stay out too late, weather is getting dark.”

John nodded rapidly, and while taking the foldable stroller in a arm and Rosie in the other as sher was playing with his blond locks, he got down the stairs to see on the landing...the Woman. Still the same despite the year. Her raven hair was as per usual brought back into a sophisticated bun, and her ruby red lipstick was as always, perfect. Compared to the doctor Watson and his now-grey hair, his sweaters truncated by shirts, and his face marled by the sadness caused by years of horror, he felt miserable. He held his daughter a little closer to his chest, and nodded in greeting.

“Adler.”

“Dear John Watson” she said in a charming murmur as a lovely smile drew on her lips. “I see that you are doing fine...now. Sherlock told me you had a difficult time.” She gave a surprised look at the baby the blond held before asking with some trouble : “That child...who does he belong to ?”   
“To me. Rosamund Mary Watson.”   
“Oh, I didn’t know…” She seemed to think for a moment, her emerald green eyes in the void before coming back to the father. “Congratulation.”

“Thank you. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

“Yes, I understand. Goodbye.”

_ She...understands? How can she understand something that even I don’t comprehend?  _ John said ironically to himself as he went out of the appartement and he felt the humid atmosphere around him. In the distance, the storm rumbled, as a sinister rain drowned little by little the heart of the former soldier as he rushed into the streets of London.

——☺——

The dominatrix was scrutinizing him in the mirror, letting that transparent barrier between their irises. She didn’t want to meet his eyes, because, that was the Sherlock Holmes way to know your weaknesses, exploit your flaws. She knew that, and she was planning to play this part with her own rules. She stayed still in front of the glass, letting him behind her, his demarcated figure in the room by his pallor, and his dark clothes.

“So…” she started slowly while observing the consulting detective with meticulousness, “John Watson shares his life with a woman...How do you live that?”

“He shared. And I didn’t mind.”

“We both know you’re lying...that night, when you came to join me when drugs had every hold on you…”

“...”

“Have you some regrets regarding that night by my side?”

“Why did you accept?” Sherlock interrupted her without paying attention to what she said, as if he woke up from a long dream. “This time. Before. Now. Everytime I called you, you came even if you knew that I didn’t really needed you, but only...someone. Someone to make me forget.”

“Because we are the same, Mister Holmes.Our mind, our way to think…” She spinned in the room without leaving the thin face of the brown man even one moment. In the reflection of the mirror, she could see the man’s eyes pupils following every mouvement she made without moving by one centimeter himself. “Despite not knowing the feeling, I can do things you can’t. I can guess that what bothers you is John Watson, as I can deduce what the subject was, is and will be him again, every time you’ll think about me, because that’s how you are. You say you are heartless, you are hiding yourself behind self-portraits, and you are trying to make yourself believe you can’t love.”

“It was the case, before I almost killed myself to protect people I cared about.” He whispered and he lowered his head, his expression darkened by some wounds that were difficult to heal.

Irene stayed silent at his sentence. She knew one day, Sherlock Holmes would suffer from that realisation that he is as human as the other. But she didn’t thought he would go this far, not like this. She too had falsified her death to serve her own interest, but she had no one to really mourn her. No one that would live with you for so much time, and would cry over your grave everyday you’re gone. 

If she had notice how time had changed the doctor, she only noticed now what it had done to the detective. He seemed less childish, the look less vivid, the less skin smooth. In his pupils, we now see a vague and impregnable expression, a reminiscence of cocaine and hospital and grief. Sherlock told her once that he had to leave his apartment, John and his old life for two years without giving any details, and Irene could only imagine what was the damage done to the two roommates. But with the reality in front of her eyes, it had even more impact, it was even more violent.

“Where will you stop for him !” She exclaimed, losing for a moment her usual softness. “Is your life worth so little compared to your friend? What do you want from me now, while you have no more hopes?”

“It’s not for you to ask questions in any case. I just want to know how you got what I miss. How could you have shown the whole world your faceless sexuality, how do you make them love you.”

“I know women adore me. And you, you know John Watson like everyone else. Because you feel an attachment even deeper that everything you felt” She laughed a bit with a head mouvement, before raising an eyebrow. “Dear Holmes, you want to see what my coming will do on him. On you. My advices will be useless to you, you know it. You don’t even want a dinner with me.”

She finished her sentence by moistening the lips with a seductive look, because she likes to play, even if it was useless. Sherlock look at the Woman’s pink mouth during her action, but he quickly turned his eyes away.

“What should I do?”

“Use me one last time, Mister Holmes, and you’ll know. Use me, and we’ll see what John Watson will feel for you.”

“But at what cost?”

“This” she said, and her expression softened with a touch of sympathy. “is up to you to see.”

“Like the risk of a last game?”replied the brown man with bitterness in his voice that made her shake

“Love, Sherlock Holmes, is not a game. It’s the new sexy.”

——☺——

John knew, with exact certainty, almost medicinal, that what he’ll see when opening the door of his (their) apartment will not please him at all. Sometimes he wished to be wrong, but it's when he saw Irene and Sherlock face to face, talk to each other softly that he cursed his often right deductions.What made him titler, with a snap of his tongue against his palate without discretion, was their fingers intertwined and Alder in his armchair. His brain was always sly when it was about feelings, whispered him that he could have been in the dominatrix’s place, before. If Moriarty hadn’t forced Sherlock to throw himself off a roof, and now John had too much bitterness to hope going back in the past. He turned his dark irises away when he saw that his best friend noticed his presence, and John seemed instantly absorbed by his daughter who was playing as always with his buttons of his shirt - his favourite, chose especially by Sherlock for his birthday, and was he masochist by remembering that now?

“So, that walk?” the brown man asked without taking away the young lady’s hand who gave him a provocative look. “you look frustrated John.”

“Oh, leave me alone.” the former military hissed with more firmness that he wanted. Oh well, Sherlock looked for it. “I can go back outside if you want.”

“We had finished doctor Watson. I give you back Mister Holmes.”

_ Finished what?  _ the blond one asked himself with a chill. Irene, with a smirk, finally got on her feet and went to the brown man’s room, with an elegant demarche that John envied a few seconds, before turning back to Sherlock who was also observing the Woman get out of the room. He frowned but said nothing, directing himself only to his armchair in silent and took back the place which was due to him. At his  _ best friend _ ’s side.

“You were talking?”

“Among others.” Sherlock answered avoiding his eyes, and Watson noticed his fine hands firmly grip the armrests, his knuckles slightly whitened. “I wanted to ask you something, John. Well, I would like your advice on something.”

“I don’t know where you’re going with this question, really surprising from you I would say.” started carefully the doctor. “But you know I’ll always be there for you.”

_ But if it concerns you and Adler, I don’t know if I could like her ever again. _ He didn’t felt surprise by that thought, and it cools him on the field. It’s been a long time that he stopped veiling his face, but that didn’t meant it was easy to live. Especially in those kinds of moments, when their bodies were so close, but their friendship crumbled.

He told Sherlock to try his luck with her, he told him that she was there for him, alive and that she loved him. He insisted until the curly one lose his temper, and while he was saying those words, John Watson changed in his head the “she” on “I”, the action of a worried best friend for a friend to a pretendant who kept his mouth shut for too many years. Sometimes he took advantage of being his roommate so he could accidentally touch his shoulder, graze his knuckles, smile at him almost sweetly. He took advantage of that unconditional love, reveled in it like an alcohol, needed it like a drug, and at the end of every day, at the end of every cases, he asked himself if, one day, he could just forget him. One day where he could say that William Sherlock Scott Holmes was his friend, and that he wouldn’t have that impression of treason by a love way too strong he held for this man, an Agape love who couldn’t be Philia. 

“As I think I have explained to you many times before, romantic entanglement... is the grit in a sensitive instrument…”

“The crack in the lens and so goes on. I know Sherlock.  _ That’s why I keep quiet since we met. _ Where are you going with that? Is it for the case you wouldn’t inform me about? Adler couldn’t help you?” There was some resentment in him.

“In a way, she helped. But I wanted your opinion. There are some things I do not comprehend, feelings I don’t understand. I don’t know how to differentiate them, how to study them…”

“Sherlock,” the blond one cut him off with a certain exasperation in his tone. “I myself was never good with this, you know that better than everyone else.” The brown man gave him an indecipherable expression as an answer, and John thought for a minute about the detective’s arms against him, squeezing him as if he was the most precious thing in the world. “And feelings...you can’t study them. They come, just like that, without you noticing. They insinuate and impose themselves on you and you can’t do anything. There are no experiment, no analysis, not even a study you can create.

“So how to see if they’re..how to define them? How do people differentiate love from friendship? Attraction to passion?”

The words echoed loudly, too loudly in the small apartment on 221b Baker Street, and John was afraid of the rest, of how the discussion would turn out.

“I have always been attracted to Irene.” mumured Sherlock, and John closed his eyes. “As she was always there for me. But I never desired her, never wanted to touch her, never wanted to make her mine. I was never jealous of the women she was dealing with, I saw her again…”

“When?” The doctor asked with a neutral tone, with his heart hurting him even more. How lucky was this woman, to may have taken the place he had at his friend’s side before.

“At your wedding. I was high.”

“You took some during MY wedding?!”

“No, after. I am still sorry to have left early.”

“Why Sherlock ?! If you had sunk again, you could have told me ! I don’t care it may have been the most important day of my life, or to leave in a second people that I don’t even knew their names, shit. Why you haven’t told me again?! Am I that untrustworthy, so that you prefer to turn to the Woman rather than me? " He was furious, he felt his beats echo throughout his body, his blood congealed. He felt an anger that he kept inside maybe for too long, that had never exploded entirely before. Emotions locked up and just waiting to come out.  _ My God,  _ if he knew Sherlock had taken some again…

“John.” And it rang like an avertissement, and he  _ hated _ that.

“Molly knew ! Your parents, even Mycroft that you say hate, all the homeless of London knew, soon all the taxi drivers…”

“It was to protect you John. I told you that, and repeated it, and you know deep inside it’s true. So damn it, stop bringing the subject back to the carpet!”

“I will continue until you give me a real answer Sherlock !”

“An answer for what?”

It was as cumbersome as when he had asked Sherlock to finally answer Irene Adler. It was the same broken voice as when the detective had spat on him that he would not do it, and that love was a weakness. The same fury that reminded him they were still at the same point.  _ Choose her, and go with her. Choose me, without saying it aloud. _

“I don’t know !” John Watson shouted and his lie said even more.

Surprised, Rosie who watched them started crying when his father spoke loudly. Sherlock stayed silent. He deciphered him with his blue eyes, dark, clear,  _ he was laying him bare,  _ bit his lip, was avoiding, and the blond man was terrified. He took his daughter and pressed her against his chest, against the pain which was opening and he closed his eyes very slowly, letting darkness get him while he was waiting for his sentence. Sherlock was going to find out. He’ll guess, like he did for Molly. He will destroy him, like he did for Molly. The former military maybe will tell him “Say it as you mean it” and he’ll be satisfied by his roommate’s falsity, failing to have what he wanted. He didn’t need words : words hurt. They weren’t working like that. John needed a sign, who could finally tell him to breathe, or to drown. Because he loved him, oh, by a love so strong it hurts.

Moriarty was wrong, it wasn’t Sherlock’s heart that burned : it was his.

Time seemed to flow slowly, too slowly. John felt every second, every beat of the brown man, every smothered breath of Rosie slowly calming down, he counted every thought that crossed him, and every scenarios that turned, turned, turned…

“Women are not really my area.”

John opened his eyes, out of breath.

“I'm attracted, but I do not feel anything for her. Plus, she likes women. She told you one day John. When you were yelling at her… I didn’t...understand…”

John breathed the same air as Sherlock, his face suddenly closer to him, to his skin, to his mouth, it was  _ just, too much. _

“I told you many times and after that Mary, so…” The consulting detective seemed out of breath, and he let a thin smile run across his face, with a caressing expression that had always seemed there, and at the same time, seemed to enlighten his person with a new light. He opened his mouth many times, before whispering one word that brought John back to the surface. “...Dinner? Let your jealousy aside, let my so-called marriage to my work aside… Would you like to accept?”

Sherlock Holmes had guessed. He saw these emotions wrap his best best, he had blinked, and had seen why he had always been blind. John had opened his eyelids and was vulnerable.  _ I don’t know ... how much time did we lose? _

“And your..case?” John finally asked as if he had trouble speaking.

“Oh. Irene Adler is resolving it.”

“Starving then.”

They didn’t leave each other eyes, close to one another, in a way to fragile moment to be broken. World didn’t exist anymore, in this expanding bubble at the 221b Baker Street.

The Woman, her head half concealed by the doorway, said nothing. She backed away slowly, leaving the two men alone. Maybe it was time to go. Love was something she haven’t met yet, but when she saw them, she thought it was…

Sexy.


End file.
